Posts by Mike Dimmick

Page:

Re: The rest of the licence fee

When the ad market crashed after the Credit Crunch, Channel 4 were all for top-slicing the licence fee and grabbing a bit. When they saw what the government did to freezing it in 2010 - and the ad market recovered - they were suddenly rather less keen and stopped talking about it. So it never actually happened.

-webkit- prefixes in Edge

Microsoft have discovered that a very large part of the web - particularly the mobile web - doesn't work properly without -webkit prefixes. So they've implemented a ton of them in Edge: http://www.justrog.com/2015/05/the-web-no-longer-works-without-webkit.html .

Not abandoned

The Windows Phone development team got merged into the Windows development team two years ago - in fact it was a reverse takeover, with Terry Myerson and Joe Belfiore taking the reins of the Windows group. Now both products are built from the same source tree. Windows Phone 8 and 8.1 were both forks of the PC codebase, which allowed WP to go its own merry way for that version, but made it incredibly hard to then merge back together to pick up the changes in Windows. Now, new features have to be designed to work on both small and large form factors, and handle touch, keyboard, mouse and controller inputs (Xbox One is now also built from the same tree).

There will still be platform-specific APIs, but it will be possible to test for and use them at runtime - search for API Contracts.

What was announced last week was that the first-party *hardware* team would be cut back, and only release a few new devices per year - reportedly a small and a large screen device in low-, mid- and high-end specs. (Microsoft only mentioned the three targeted tiers, they didn't actually mention two devices per tier.) They certainly did not say that they were pulling out of hardware entirely, just focusing on a few devices rather than the dozens (with dozens of minor variants that share the same model number!) that Nokia were producing.

IE hasn't used the COM JavaScript engine since IE9. IE9 moved to implementing the DOM type system in JS. Justin Rogers of the Edge team posted an interesting look at how this works at http://www.justrog.com/2015/05/javascript-type-system-evolution-from.html?m=1

Conditional comments are not supported in 'edge' and IE10 document modes in IE10 and 11. Only when emulating IE 9 or older. https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/hh801214(v=vs.85).aspx

Actually...

Don't put authentication into systems that don't need it. It looks to me as if that's a username/password combo for routing the appropriate signalling information to that particular workstation. That is, the signalman for that area always goes to that workstation, rather than the signals following the user to whatever workstation he logs in at.

If that's the desired configuration it shouldn't require the user to enter it at all!

JScript.NET has existed since .NET 1.0 was released in 2002. However, it hasn't been tracking ECMAScript releases, being approximately based on ES3.

I can't see anything saying that the recommended way to use JavaScript to write Windows Store apps - using WinJS - has changed at all. That will continue to use the Chakra engine and presumably the new EdgeHTML rendering engine from Spartan, once you change your manifest to Windows 10. I'd expect Windows 8 and 8.1 Store apps to continue using the older MSHTML in Edge mode.

25% of nothing is still nothing

The problem with Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon etc is that they are falsely attributing costs and revenues in order to declare a reduced or zero profit in the UK. It doesn't matter if the rate is 20%, 25% or 100%, the Treasury won't get anything. This is a deliberate attempt by the government to claim to be doing something while in fact doing nothing. It is worse than doing nothing as it has the appearance of having solved the problem, taking public attention away from it.

Filing system

This is probably to deal with people who use the Deleted Items folder as a filing system. I've worked with people who do this - they move messages to Deleted Items once they've been actioned but expect them to stay there indefinitely for archive purposes.

On-premises Exchange leaves them alone, so I'm not surprised to see Exchange Online doing the same thing.

UK Extended Layout

Install the United Kingdom Extended keyboard layout. This supports pressing AltGr+a key with an accent-like character on it as a 'dead key' - press another letter to add that accent to that letter. In addition, just pressing AltGr+a vowel gives you the acute-accent version of that vowel (plus also w and y which are used in Welsh).

The back-tick key ` becomes a dead key without requiring shifts. If you need to actually type this as a programmer, just hit space afterward.

The only annoying part is that Windows tracks keyboard layout per program, so if you have more than one layout installed you have to check which one is selected for every new program you run.

Never mind the quality, feel the width

UHD will require at least twice the bitrate of HD*, so you'll get at best half as many channels in the same spectrum. When surveyed, users want more content over better quality. It's how the Freeview channels get away with 544x576, a frame size designed for 4:3 content rather than 16:9 (if using the same horizontal resolution as 720 pixels at 16:9, 544 pixels produce a 4:3 frame).

* Assumption - that HD continues to use H.264/AVC while UHD uses H.265/HEVC. UHD has four times as many pixels as HD and the bitrate tends to scale linearly with number of pixels. It's hoped that HEVC will eventually achieve a 2:1 improvement in compression over AVC for approximately the same visual quality. It will probably take many years, though - right now, the result is little better than AVC.

Less storage

Yes, there is a Lumia out there with less storage: the Lumia 530 only has 4GB. This was basically a chassis designed by Nokia to run either Android or Windows Phone. The savings don't appear to have been worth it - Microsoft are essentially replacing it with the Lumia 532, which has 1GB of RAM and 8GB of storage for basically the same price. (The launch price of the 532 is actually lower than that of the 530.)

If you have the Windows Phone 8 or 8.1 emulators installed on your computer, you can actually see the problem by mounting the .vhdx file. The storage is divided into a number of disk partitions, with the OS partition being essentially immutable. This means a phone reset is easy, you just wipe the user partition, rather than having a backup copy of the OS as Windows 8 does on desktop, laptop or tablet. It sounds like it's impossible to resize the OS partition in a device update, in order to make more space, or at least not in just a Windows update. The talk of 'partition stitching' suggests that they might intend to spread the OS into more than one partition for WP8.x phones - of course the Windows NT volume manager driver has been able to do this since at least Windows 2000.

I wouldn't be surprised to see this partitioning behaviour go away for phones built for Windows 10. It's just added complexity. It doesn't look like Windows Phone supports the Compressed OS feature from Windows 8.1 yet, so there could still actually be a reduction in size from WP 8.1 to 10.

Re: Huh?

@BongoJoe: Contacting them how? Their support policy is pretty clear.

Microsoft will consider hotfixes and Design Change Requests for products within the Mainstream Support phase of their lifecycle, if you raise a case with Product Support Services. That means paying, using a free support incident that came with your product purchase (if bought as a retail product), or through Software Assurance or a Premier Support Plan.

If you obtained the product with your computer (which is how most people get Windows), your first port of call is your OEM - the reduced price of the OEM Windows edition doesn't include support, it's outsourced to the OEM. If you bought an OEM version of Windows on the open market and installed it yourself, congratulations! You don't get any support.

If the product has moved on to the Extended Support phase, which Windows 7 did on 13 January, you need to have bought an Extended Support Hotfix Agreement within the first 90 days after it did so. You can then get hotfixes by contacting support. They won't consider any Design Change Requests, though.

If you contact the product group through blogs, email, connect.microsoft.com or User Voice, they might consider your issue for a fix in the next version of the product. They're unlikely to develop a patch for existing versions unless there is some wider issue that you're highlighting. Generally patches for released versions are developed by the Windows Customer eXperience Engineering team, not the people working on the next release.

I would expect to see this start to change if Microsoft are really going to treat Windows 10 as an 'evergreen' release in the way that Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox are 'evergreen' browsers. The way it works now is based on the principles of stability - no changes unless strictly necessary - and that someone has to pay for the fix to be developed. If you're not paying (or haven't pre-paid) they're just not interested.

The support you're not getting for Windows XP is that you're not getting security updates. No-one is checking whether Windows XP is vulnerable to any of the issues that have been reported, and if it is, there is no commitment to developing fixes.

Re: Another source of misleading registrations

I think shelf companies should be reported with an SIC code of 99999, and therefore be distinguishable from real company registrations, but the point probably stands.

EDIT: I found a company offering shelf company registrations at http://www.formacompany.co.uk/en/united-kingdom/uk-shelf-company and looked up some of their tech-sounding companies on the Companies House WebCheck. Big Blue Data Ltd and Highway Software Ltd were registered with SIC code 74990 - Non-Trading Company.

Windows 8 does not have the new APIs

I don't expect this version of Office to come to Windows 8, because I expect that there will have been substantial extensions to Windows Runtime in order to support Office's functionality. This is one reason why Windows 10 will be a free upgrade.

If Windows Runtime 8.1 had APIs that could support all of Office's functionality, I would have expected Microsoft to have already released Office for Modern Windows, parallel with the iOS version.

Re: Touchy feely does not equal productive

Internet Explorer users

IE users can selectively block Flash and other plug-ins loaded by pages using the ActiveX Filtering feature. This has been part of IE since IE9. Click the gear icon at the right-hand end of the tab bar, go to Safety, then check ActiveX Filtering.

Now, when a site tries to load any ActiveX object - including Flash and Java applets - it will silently ignore them. You'll get a blue circle icon with a diagonal line through it, just to the left of the reload icon. If you want to re-enable for that site, click the icon, then click "Turn off ActiveX Filtering". Despite the name, it only operates for that site.

The blue icon will also appear in the top-left of any placeholder areas where the control would have loaded.

On any page on that site which loads an ActiveX control in future, you'll see a grey icon instead of the blue one (same shape). Click the grey icon then click "Turn on ActiveX Filtering" to filter out again.

On Windows 8 and 8.1, Metro IE does not have any UI to control ActiveX Filtering - since it won't load any ActiveX control barring Flash - but it does obey the filtering rules. To turn it on and off, and control it for a site, open the page in desktop IE.

Re: This type of mentality is irrational, bordering stupidity.

"Netflix uses Silverlight which is Flash's direct competitor by Microsoft. It faces the same problems and it also has been patched a lot recently."

Have to pull you up on this. Silverlight 5 for 32-bit Windows has been patched five times in its entire existence, from December 2011 (so a little over 3 years). Three were remote code execution issues, one could potentially allow information disclosure, and one was a defence-in-depth measure correcting a problem where other code could be attacked using Silverlight as a vector (it meant the location of attack code was predictable). The most recent patch was last March.

Horrible communication from MS

I think this is bad communication from MS, compounded by poor/lack of branding. They have both 'Windows 10' as an umbrella term meaning the whole family of related products, and 'Windows 10' as a specific set of components, which is the product for x86 desktops, laptops, and tablets over 8" in diagonal. I think they mean that Windows RT devices will not be updated to 'Windows 10' the product - just as Windows RT 8.1 doesn't have all the components of 'Windows 8.1' the product - while there will still be a product from the Windows 10 family. They haven't decided exactly what will be in it yet, and they don't want to brand it 'Windows RT 10' because they don't want to continue the confusion.

The big question is whether to continue to include the desktop, and all the Win32 and COM components which it depends on.

It hinges on Office. Windows RT devices all included Office Home & Student 2013, the same code recompiled for ARM, with only features removed that couldn't be easily rewritten for ARM within the time available. The proposed Office for Windows Runtime is expected to have a fuller feature set than Office for iOS or Android, but it could well end up being smaller than what Office RT provided.

If so, the dilemma for the Windows team is whether to replace Windows RT with SKU #2, and lose features from Office, or to replace it with SKU #1, and continue to ship the desktop version of Office, appropriately cut down (although presumably still missing the same features as it was before, depending on whether they invested any effort in rewriting those components.) It may be that Office's feature set is still not finalized sufficiently to make this decision - it could be a very late breaking announcement as to which way they're going to go.

Saying that there will be no upgrade path, or that it won't be Windows 10 (what on earth else would it be if not some subset of all components in the Windows 10 build tree?), is massively premature.

Re: Perforce

My understanding is that Windows still uses Source Depot, which is a fork of Perforce. That replaced a home-grown tool in late 2000, during XP development.

Mind you, historically, the Windows team have always thought that anything that came out of DevDiv was crap. There's a reason they started over with Windows Runtime rather than continue with WPF or Silverlight, and why very little was ever done with MFC or Windows Forms.

Re: worse @ streaky

Certificate authorities simply sign the server certificate to indicate that they issued it. It can imply that they did some background checks to ensure that the person requesting the certificate did in fact represent the organisation that the certificate claims to be generated by, although you pay for what you get: a CA that countersigns certificates for free is unlikely to have made substantial checks.

The CA never sees the private key corresponding to the public key contained in the certificate, so cannot decrypt or help decrypt communications.

The security services can subvert a certificate authority, to get them to sign a fake certificate that claims to be for the site that you're trying to use. That can then be used in a man-in-the-middle attack. It doesn't require that the CAs explicitly have an agreement to allow the NSA or GCHQ to do this, fraudulent certificates have been issued in the past simply through social engineering. If the security services can get their own CA into the browsers' list of trusted root authorities, they don't even have to do that.

Google have proposed (and implemented in Chrome) a technology called 'public key pinning' which requires that, for a period of time, the certificate presented by a server must have been signed by a specific public key. That requires the attacker to actually compromise the CA that countersigned the genuine certificate, rather than compromising any CA or setting up a fake root CA.

Re: Google's free Codec

Doesn't help if the patent holder is not part of MPEG LA's patent pool, which Max Sound and VSL are not. Presumably they are suing Google / YouTube because they have the deepest pockets, but if successful you can expect every one of MPEG LA's licensees to get sued as well.

MPEG LA is a *voluntary* grouping of patent holders who have chosen to offer licences for their patents as a group. There is no compulsion for any patent holder to join and there can still be submarine patents held by anyone else. If the holder participated in the standardisation process, they're supposed to offer the patents on a FRAND basis, but if the standard accidentally includes something that was patented by a third party, all implementers could be liable for heavy royalties and discriminatory behaviour.

It is simply not practical to have a fully-vetted standard. There are too many patents issued every year even for experts to keep up, and they're not readable by engineers so there's really no telling what might turn out to be considered an infringement.

Still, I think it's better to go with standards that are developed in the open with the opportunity for patents to be disclosed and either worked around, or held under FRAND promises (though this may not be worth much when companies demand huge percentages of sale price from every vendor - it's not discriminatory if you're screwing everyone). VPx and other privately-developed encodings will always suffer more from submarine patents than the ISO/IEC/ITU families.

Re: industry subpar knock-offs

You need a 64-bit CPU to access more than 3 gigabytes of RAM, though (same as with a PC), and modern smartphones are right up around that mark.

You need a 64-bit CPU to provide more than 2 gigabytes of virtual memory to applications (anywhere between 2 and 4GB, depends on the operating system and its configuration, but 2GB is typical because it's trivial to separate user and system space).

ARM's ARMv7A architecture supports Large Physical Address Extensions, which permit a 32-bit processor to manage a 40-bit address space - up to 1TB of RAM. ARM first implemented this in the Cortex-A15 core. It's up to the OS to map the app's virtual memory to whatever regions of physical memory are required.

All current phone/tablet operating systems restrict the amount of memory that an app is permitted to use. iOS does not have published limits but reportedly the iPhone 5 will close your app if you allocate more than 645MB of its 1GB RAM. Android has an OEM-configurable maximum heap size - you can request a 'large heap' which gives a higher limit to your app, but this is still dependent on the OEM and is well short of the total memory available. Windows Phone 8.1 allows apps designed for 8.1 up to 185 MB for phones with less than 1GB of RAM, 390 MB for 1GB devices and 825 MB for 2GB devices. I believe these limits are relatively low so that several apps can remain in memory at once.

Re: which should be the default more-reliable case in the event of conflicting input?

@Charles Manning: Air France 447 is a case in which all three of your points occurred. And that occurred with experienced pilots who had been taking shifts in order to ensure they were fresh and alert. They still failed to recognise the situation they were in, applied inappropriate control inputs and crashed the plane.

Frankly, I think auto-pilot cars are dangerous as the meatsacks will be tempted not to pay any attention. I also haven't seen any sign that the control software will be designed to proper safety standards, not provision for independent, redundant control systems as used in aircraft. Cars may be slower and closer to the ground, but there are many more of them packed much closer together.

Re: Remind me again why we "need" this BS?

2. It's not a good idea to leave damp washing in the machine for a long time. It can start to smell fusty.

I use the timer function on my washing machine to ensure that it's done roughly when I expect to get home from work, or alternatively shortly after I get up in the morning, depending on whether I remember to load the machine before going to bed.

I can just barely see the use for bringing the finishing time forward if I decide to leave work early, or pushing it back if I'm going to be late, but you'd have to know before it's actually started washing that you wanted to delay it. (Typically not a good idea to stop the machine in the middle of the programme.)

The benefit to me is tiny, so I wouldn't spend any more on an IoT washing machine over an equivalent non-IoT version, and I certainly wouldn't be looking to upgrade (and get on the upgrade treadmill, to keep up to date with all the patches necessary to ensure that miscreants can't use it to send spam/crack keys/mine Bitcoin - assuming the manufacturers produce them) just for this feature. Given that router manufacturers - producing a vital piece of comms equipment exposed to the public internet - don't keep up on producing patches, I have no hope that general consumer electronics makers will.

I wouldn't have had the timer, except that since the machine is in the kitchen of my one-bed house with only a worktop between that and the lounge, it really makes too much noise to run it in the evening. Now, a machine that could spin near-silently at 1200rpm, that would be worth having!

Re: It doesn't matter how good the display is if there's nothing to display

The BBC some time ago (at least) transmitted BBC 1 HD with an output that swapped between interlaced and progressive at the GOP boundaries depending on which they were getting a better compression from.

This has now been rolled out to all services on the PSB3 Freeview HD multiplex (BBC One/Two/Three HD, ITV HD, 4hd) and I believe it is also used on COM7 (CBeebies/BBC Four, Channel 4+1, 4seven, Al Jazeera HD).

I don't think it is used on satellite - changing the interlacing mode on a GOP basis was not part of the Freesat or Sky specifications. Doing this caused a problem on early Freeview HD units, and in some cases TVs using external Freeview HD boxes (it depended whether the box passes through the 1080p25 GOPs or converts to 1080i50). There tended to be brief switches to black and audio glitches on mode switches - annoying but bearable on programme transitions, not acceptable when it could switch more than once per second (a GOP is usually shorter than 25 frames)

UPCs are incredibly cheap

Membership of your national GS1 subsidiary costs a couple of hundred to a couples of thousand dollars depending on your company turnover. GS1 UK charge £107 joining fee and £117 annual membership if your turnover is under £500k, which entitled you to codes for 1,000 distinct products. There is no per-product fee. You just have to include the barcode in the label you were going to print anyway. It literally costs nothing beyond ensuring that the printed label is in spec.

For turnover of £1bn or higher, the joining fee is £327 and annual fee is £2,602, which gets you a prefix valid for 100,000 product codes.

A Global Trade Item Number (UPC is a subset) describes one product. Not a family. In the milk example, skimmed milk will have a different code from semi-skimmed. A 2pt container will have a different code from 1pt. Organic a different code from regular, from value. Order the same code and you'll get the same back.

RFID tags contain the GTIN as one of the data components, so you don't make any saving compared to a paper barcode - you still have to be a member of GS1 if you want to sell your products at any retailer. If you just want to sell your products in-house, there's a range of GTIN codes reserved for private use.

If you want fewer than 1,000 codes, you can go to a reseller who will register your product under one of their prefixes. They can be a lot more expensive per code. You still only pay once to register the product, every use of that code is free.

11 SP1 by another name

The problem here is that Microsoft refused to call their April update - corresponding with Windows 8.1 Update 1 - by a new name. So they have to go around calling it 'with the 2929437 update installed'.

If they had actually called it by its true name - Service Pack 1 - it would be clear that they are breaking their own Service Pack and Security Update policies (and the same goes for 8.1 Service Pack 1). The Service Pack Policy says that they will support service packs for Windows (and Windows components such as IE) for 24 months after the release of the following service pack. The Security Update Policy says:

"Microsoft will provide security update support for a minimum of 10 years (through the Extended Support phase) for Business, Developer and Desktop Operating System products. The security updates will apply only to the supported service pack level for these products.

"Both the Mainstream Support and the Extended Support phases require that the product’s supported service pack level be installed to continue to receive and install security updates.

"Security updates will be available from Windows Update during the Mainstream Support phase, and the Extended Support phase (if available)."

Since there is officially no service pack for Windows 8.1 or for IE 11, security updates should be on Windows Update for the original release, regardless of whether another update has already been installed. Alternatively, if we count Update 1/2929437 as being Service Pack 1, they have still withdrawn support for the original release nearly two years before they should have.

Memory inside microcontrollers?

Current generation microcontrollers have far more memory than needed to contain the very simple program for a keyboard. You could program the keyboard controller with a document, then use some special switch or key sequence to have it type out that document on demand.

We know that "security" services sometimes engage in physical hacks, breaking in at night and replacing the keyboard with one programmed to record your keystrokes. Later they can break in again and collect the recorded data from the logging keyboard. It's not a stretch to think that journalists could use a similar approach to hide copies of documents - or at least that the goons would think that.

Too many devices

The dirty secret is that a base station (Node B, ENode B) can only handle about 1,000 devices - or so I was told by a network engineer about a year ago. More than that, and the control channel is completely swamped with the handshaking data.

Sector antennas are used to split up the area surrounding the mast into multiple cells - each antenna covering anywhere from 5° to 180° of the circle surrounding the station - with one base station handling each antenna. It's likely that only one or two base stations actually cover the stadium (obviously depending on the siting of the masts relative to the seating) meaning there are probably at least 10x as many devices in range as the station can actually handle.

Conversely, at the British Grand Prix a couple of years ago, I rented a Fanvision device. Antennas around the circuit broadcast on VHF frequencies, using the DVB-H system. You had a choice of three video feeds, two different commentary feeds, timing information (last and best lap for each driver plus sector times) and news headlines from Autosport. Wasn't cheap though, think it was around £100 rental for the weekend. Sadly F1 no longer allow Fanvision to operate at their events - presumably Bernie wanted too much money. They do still operate at Nascar events and the Indy 500.

LTE Broadcast is exactly what it says, however - broadcast. It would behave just like Fanvision. Specific video streams would be broadcast without reference to whether anyone was interested in receiving them. You might be able to get a Scores app that understood how to interpret score data being broadcast, but for Twitter and other websites/web services you'd still be stuck with the overloaded ordinary network. That general purpose network might even be worse if the carrier has reassigned a frequency from the main network to the Broadcast system, reducing the spectrum available to the regular unicast network.

"By 2018 he envisages data usage as twelve times that of 2012, and as Vodafone has recently said this is heavily driven by the adoption of 4G."

I don't agree. My view is that as users step up from feature phone and older 'smart'phones to current-generation smartphone, they go from hardly using data at all to using hundreds of MB per month. However, they pretty soon plateau at a level of mobile data usage that they're happy with. As the rate of adoption of smartphones starts to slow down - Ofcom's most recent Technology Tracker survey puts it at 65% of the population, up from 63% the previous quarter - I expect the rate of increase in mobile data to slow down. Most projections are taking the initial exponential growth in data usage and extrapolating exponential growth into the future, uncritically.

It's true that browsing on phones and tablets is displacing browsing on home PCs. However, at least some of that browsing is happening on Wi-Fi - in the same survey, 73% said they browsed on their phones using their mobile data connection, 69% said they used home Wi-Fi and 32% used Wi-Fi elsewhere. In the previous quarter that was 72% on mobile (+1%), 64% on home Wi-Fi (+5%) and 30% on hotspots (+2%). The survey doesn't say what proportion of browsing was done on each, but I would expect that where home Wi-Fi is available it would be largely used in preference to mobile data.

"The WP team has released three updates since 2012"

Nope. The Windows Phone team has only worked on Windows Phone 8.1 since the release of Windows Phone 8.

All the updates to Windows Phone 8 have come out of the Windows Sustained Engineering team, which is part of Product Support Services. That's why they have only done work that OEMs have requested (plus egregious bugs) rather than advance the product forward.

The reason for the long wait for WP8.1 is the heavy engineering to complete the port of Windows Runtime from Windows 8.x. I'm pleasantly surprised to see that they have actually implemented a pretty good slate of new features as well as that, I had feared that the updated developer platform would be all we'd get.

Why do I call it "heavy engineering"? Windows Runtime's implementation on Windows 8.x is implemented using Win32 GDI, USER, Direct2D, DirectWrite and numerous COM components. The dependency chain on this is a nightmare, with seemingly every component having cross-references into some other component, and would break if those other components were missing. It's taken them years to decouple the lower layers to the extent that Windows Phone 8 is even possible, that it's not expecting to find a full copy of GDI in there. (The MinWin project reportedly started in 2003.) Windows Phone has to fit into a relatively small footprint (my Lumia 820 has 8GB of storage and indicates that 1.8 GB is used by the system). Taking the Win32 dependencies as a whole is not an option, it's too big. So, to port it to Windows Phone, they've had to either follow the dependency chain and work out where to cut it, or to reimplement the feature without taking the dependencies.

It won't be complete in Windows Phone 8.1 - there will still be APIs available on Windows 8.1 not in WP8.1, and possibly vice versa - but it will be possible to have common UI code, which *wasn't* possible in WP8/W8. I hope that after this, the Windows code will be changed to the WP8.1 version, and the Windows team will write any new APIs cleanly so that it can go into both products without causing huge lag. If the aim is to change the 'Windows RT' SKU to use the Windows Phone codebase rather than the Windows 8 codebase, this will have to happen.

Usage stats, not purchase

The source for the data is the User-Agent string detected by the analytics scripts running in the web browser, for web sites using Net Applications for their analytics. It's only capable of detecting the currently-running operating system (assuming the browser isn't lying), it's not possible to tell that a given product key would be valid for a later version.

Re: Flashing news!

I suspect they're sniffing the browser agent string and sending different content to different browsers.

Indeed - and IE11 is no longer detected as IE-family, the sniffer doesn't know what the heck it is, so it gets dumped in 'must be some previously unknown variant of Netscape 2.0'. Which is exactly what ASP.NET's default browser caps do up to .NET 4.5. There are jhotfixes available for .NET 4.0 and 2.0-3.5, but I'm not entirely sure whether they just fixed the detection files, removed the detection feature, or defaulted to assuming max capabilities rather than fewest.

IE11's User-Agent string is substantially changed from older versions of IE, *because* it is a much more compliant browser and newer websites were sending incompatible, or fallback, content. The change makes it look a lot like Chrome, which means most sites will send it their latest content version, which should be mostly compatible in IE11.

Unfortunately, this means that it is no longer detected as a 'capable' browser by much server-side detection logic shipped by Microsoft (including the original releases of ASP.NET up to version 4.5) and the server sends tag soup designed for even older browsers, typically Netscape 3.0 or even Spyglass Mosaic. It might decide that the browser doesn't support JavaScript, for example.

Microsoft Dynamics will have to come up with an update that actually detects IE11 as a 'capable' browser before it will work without selecting Compatibility Mode.

The Compatibility Mode button - which is only available on the desktop browser, it's not in the 'Metro' version - tells IE to send an IE7 User-Agent string to the server (nearly - it sends ';Trident/7.0' in the string as a tell-tale that this is really IE11, not 7). The browser then defaults to its IE7 rendering mode, unless the site sends an X-UA-Compatible HTTP header (or META tag) telling it to use a newer mode.

If IE decides that the server you're connecting to is on your Intranet, it will use the Intranet Zone settings. The default for the Intranet Zone is to always pretend to be IE7. This can of course cause problems for applications developed for IE8 and up. The Intranet Zone is, by default, only enabled for domain-joined computers, and the default detection rule is basically 'if the hostname in the URL doesn't contain any dots, it's Intranet'. The Intranet Zone rules are configured on the Security tab of Internet Option - click the Local Intranet icon, then click Sites to set up the rules for what is considered Intranet. To disable compatibility for intranet sites, press Alt+T to get the old Tools menu, and select Compatibility View Settings. Then uncheck "Display intranet sites in Compatibility View". These settings can be set through Group Policy.

Microsoft's Compatibility View Lists also gives them the ability to send a custom User-Agent for specific domains. This is what went wrong with IE11 against Google's websites when it was first release: Google's code didn't work with IE11 originally, so Microsoft added their domains to the compat view list indicating IE10 (but using the Trident/7.0 token rather than Trident/6.0 as IE10 would send). Then, just around the time that IE11 was released, Google fixed their code to work with IE11's real User-Agent, IE10's real User-Agent - but it broke when IE11 sent its pseudo-IE10 string. MS then took Google domains out of the compatibility view list, but it takes a little while for the browser to download a new list.

Re: DECadent

As I recall, there was never a public version of 64-bit Windows (beta or Gold) for Alpha. NT 4.0 supported Alpha, using the 32-bit instruction set, and Windows 2000 supported it right up to release candidate 1. Then Compaq pulled the plug on support. MS press release: http://web.archive.org/web/19991012214337/http://microsoft.com/NTServer/nts/news/msnw/compaq.asp

Why did it matter for Compaq to support it? Windows on Alpha was never a retail product, only available with a new Alpha-based system (OEM product), and MS require the OEM to provide front-line support for OEM Windows. (I think they'd do better by standing behind their product, regardless of how acquired, but it's their decision, and a large part of why OEM Windows is substantially cheaper than Retail editions.)

I believe MS continued to work on 64-bit Windows using Alpha hardware until IA-64 hardware became available in moderate volume. WOW64's origins - of running 32-bit x86 Windows programs on 64-bit Alpha 'native' operating system - explain a lot of the oddities in the handling of 32-bit programs on x86-64, such as dual views of the registry, inability to load 32-bit code in a 64-bit process, completely separate 32- and 64-bit copies of most libraries, segregated Program Files folders, etc.

Re: IE 11 User-Agent string

And Google didn't work with that, so Microsoft set up the compatibility view list so that IE sent a very-nearly IE10 string to it:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0)

The real IE10 sends:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; Trident/6.0)

At some point - presumably in the last week - Google changed their code. Now the real IE11 User-Agent string works, and the real IE10 User-Agent string works. The faux-IE10 string set by the Compatibility View list, however, doesn't. (I've just tested this out with IE10 on Windows 7, using Fiddler to change the requests before sending - sendng 'Trident/7.0' causes it to break in exactly the way described.)

So now, Microsoft have changed the Compatibility View list so that IE11 sends its native User-Agent string.

Microsoft are warning that they intend to remove the feature in future versions:

"Starting with IE11, document modes are deprecated and should no longer be used, except on a temporary basis. Make sure to update sites that rely on legacy features and document modes to reflect modern standards.

"If you must target a specific document mode so that your site functions while you rework it to support modern standards and features, be aware that you're using a transitional feature, one that may not be available in future versions."

- ...then Google changed their code last week to work properly with IE11's correct User-Agent string, but break with the IE10 string (only when the IE11-specific 'Trident/7.0' appears, and therefore doesn't break in actual IE10)...

- ...now Microsoft have removed the CV-list entry so IE11 reports as itself

The current 'ttl' element in the CV-list is set to 1, presumably cache for one day before trying again.

Information on IE's User-Agent string and Compatibility View list can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ieinternals/archive/2013/09/21/internet-explorer-11-user-agent-string-ua-string-sniffing-compatibility-with-gecko-webkit.aspx

@ Tom 13

This list does not necessarily do the same as clicking the Compatibility View button. The button forces IE to emulate IE 7 (which is useless, in my opinion - it should emulate IE 6). The Compatibility View list can cause a custom User-Agent string to be selected for a given site, it can turn other features on or off such as back-forward caching, it also lists domains that are known to require ActiveX controls (and therefore have to load in the desktop browser rather than the 'immersive' mode), and which GPUs and drivers are known to have problems with hardware acceleration.

IE11's User-Agent string is deliberately very different from IE10's, in order to cause more sites to send it standard-compliant code rather than code designed for IE 6. Google's code must have been detecting it incorrectly. In the current version of the compatibility list that I just retrieved, the only feature disabled for Google's domains is the back-forward cache. It's also excluded for microsoft.com.

Both of the above reasons fed on one another and led to a boom in TV sales.

Both reasons will have petered out. The digital switchover is complete in the major economies and well underway in the rest of the world, with deadlines in the next few years. Those people who were going to replace their TV for one with an integrated digital tuner have done so; those who added an external box are no more likely to replace their TV than they would have before switchover.

The trouble for TV manufacturers is that they really haven't come up with a new must-have beyond HD, which for many viewers is still a marginal benefit. People might be buying TVs with 3D, they might be 'Smart' TVs, they might even have 4K resolution, but in most cases that's simply because those features were bundled with a TV that had the desired size, picture and sound quality on normal 2D, 1080p and SD broadcasts.

Peak netbook?

Has anyone done an analysis of the relative sales of *real* PCs over the last five years? Those that are actually powerful enough to do more than web browsing on?

Asus and Acer were predominantly netbook manufacturers. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the market for netbooks running Windows has been essentially replaced by iOS, Android and (to an extent) Windows tablets. But the question is, is the *rest* of the PC market actually holding up beyond a brief fad for netbooks?

X-UA-Compatible not a long-term solution

Microsoft are planning to withdraw compatibility modes from IE in future versions:

"Starting with IE11 Preview, document modes are deprecated and should no longer be used, except on a temporary basis. Make sure to update sites that rely on legacy features and document modes to reflect modern standards.

"If you must target a specific document mode so that your site functions while you rework it to support modern standards and features, be aware that you're using a transitional feature, one that may not be available in future versions."

Re: Obsessed with consumers

iPhone and Android devices support (or at least support*ed*, in the case of Android) Microsoft's Exchange ActiveSync protocol, which does email 'push' over HTTP/S - so you can hook them straight up to an Exchange server (2003 SP2 or higher) or any other server that implements EAS, and you just need a normal data plan rather than Blackberry-specific plans.

(Technically, EAS Direct Push is actually client pull - the server just doesn't reply to the client's request until it has something to send or the connection is about to time out.)

The integration between Exchange and the Blackberry Enterprise Server was always one of the big pain points, so I heard. Many Exchange admins would probably be glad to bury BES and BB in a ditch somewhere.

It appears that BB10 synchronizes email using the EAS protocol - this allows a BB10 device to be used for push email without BES. Not clear whether BES10 wraps its tentacles round the heart of the Exchange server when it is installed, though, or merely acts as a man-in-the-middle extending the server's responses.

Module certification, not product

All the FIPS 140-2 certification does is say that if you use the crypto facilities in Windows (because these modules are common across all implementations of the NT kernel), that they will implement the approved algorithms properly, and not leak information outside the module to other parts of the application or to other applications. It's not a high bar.

This certification absolutely does not mean that data stored on the device is secure against external attacks.

Earlier versions of Windows and Windows Phone crypto modules were also certified - the Windows Phone 7 ones certified under Windows CE. I'm not sure what the threshold for needing a new certification is, but all that's happened here is that NIST's wheels have finished turning and the new certifications for Windows 8 have been signed off - just in time to start the process all over again for Windows 8.1. If, that is, whatever changed in 8.1 requires a new round of certification rather than just adding the approval for the new version.

Re: Possibly stupid question

Yes. It does mean that. Not because of frequencies, but because the limited spectrum available after release of '700 MHz' won't be enough to reconstruct the services we have now, at their current coverage levels, unless the newer DVB-T2 standard and AVC/H.264 compression is used for many more of the services.

If you have Freeview HD equipment, you'll be fine. Any non-HD gear quite possibly won't work, or won't receive all SD services, after this band is released. You should check that any new equipment has the 'Freeview HD' logo (YouView equipment is fully DVB-T2/AVC compatible, but doesn't fully implement IPTV in the same way as the Freeview HD logo now requires, so can't have the logo).

If the decision to switch to DVB-T2/H.264 isn't taken, then it should just be a case of retuning the box. It'll still scan channels 49 to 69, it just won't find anything up there.

Personally, I don't think the case has been made for release of this band. It seems to suffer from circular reasoning: the predicted demand for bandwidth comes from demand for linear TV on mobile devices, so we have to turn off the current linear TV broadcast in order to make space to send it over an inferior protocol?

Re: It's not about addressable memory

*Microsoft* implemented PAE just fine, from Windows 2000 onwards. Manufacturers of commodity hardware didn't - most hardware and drivers in the PC world could not handle being presented with 64-bit physical addresses. So when introducing Execute Disable/No Execute in Windows XP SP2 - which requires PAE to be turned on, on x86 processors - Microsoft deliberately capped the physical address space at 4 GB for compatibility with the cheap hardware and bad drivers.

Server editions of Windows on 32-bit processors, both before and after XP SP2 / Windows Server 2003 SP1, can access however much RAM is fitted, up to whatever the limit is for that edition of Windows. Windows Server 2003 and 2008 Standard Editions are also limited to 4 GB, but for market segmentation reasons, not technical ones (i.e. want access to more than 4 GB of RAM? Pay more).